


Bedtime Stories

by Pingoodle (ThatAloneOne)



Series: Steal Your Heart [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2020-09-24 11:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20357647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/pseuds/Pingoodle
Summary: Two Stealer legends.





	1. The Woman Who Stole Her Heart Back

A very long time ago, there was a woman. She was by no measure the prettiest, the cleverest, or the most important, but she was the most loving woman on the face of the earth. The woman loved her family. She loved her home. And most of all, she loved her husband.

Every day when the sun went down, the woman would wait for her husband to come home, her hand pressed over her heart. When he walked in the door of their humble home, she flew to his arms, and told him that she loved him. She told him that her heart was his, utterly and completely. The woman, in her love, thought that her husband was the same. Every day, he told her that he would give her his heart right back.

On the woman's sixteenth birthday — for back then, women were women very young — she waited in her house, a special dinner in the table. When the sun went down, her husband did not come home. The woman stayed at the table, and she waited. The moon rose, and her husband did not come home. All of the stars came out to worry for her, and her husband did not come home. When dawn broke, so did the woman's heart.

Her husband wandered in with the sunlight, and for a moment the woman's heart was whole again. She ran for him, as she always did, but this time he did not catch her. When she whispered that she loved him, her husband laughed. For the first time, the woman noticed how her husband's face was twisted and awful, like his insides were bitter.

The woman asked her husband where he had been, and why it had been so much more important than coming home to his loving wife. Instead of answering with words, her husband drew his knife from his hunting belt. The woman tried to run, but her home was so secure and well-made that there was nowhere to flee. Her husband crashed after her, telling her everything she'd thought she'd never hear again — he had no need for a wife that wasn't pretty, clever, or important. He had been in the next village and found a new wife that was all three, so there was no more need for the woman who loved more than any other creature on the earth.

Her husband cut their wedding vows in half, and then wrestled the ring off the woman’s finger, ignoring her heartbroken sobs. And then he left her in their empty home, lying on the floor as if all the life had left her. The woman wasn't dead, but her heart was still and cold in her chest. Slowly, she opened her eyes. She could see the doorway of the home she loved, left open and abandoned. Her husband would never again stand in the door and tell her that he loved her. She had given him her heart and received nothing in return.

And then she decided it — if she did not have a heart, she could take one. Her husband had offered, every day. If he was to take everything she loved from her, then she was entitled to take it all back.

The wedding was not for a week, so the woman walked. She walked all through the night and then the next day, not stopping, not eating, not drinking. Her chest was empty and hollow, but her strides lengthened with every bound, her body growing stronger and stronger the farther she went from her old home and her wasted love. The woman walked for six nights and sixdays to reach the village, and arrived at the end of the sixth day. When the sun went down, she knocked on her husbands door. He answered, and the woman flung herself toward him for the last time. 

She said, “Your heart is mine,” and then she took it, her palm laid flat to his chest. Energy soared between them like lightning, and the woman’s chest filled with her husband’s heart, beating stronger than hers ever had. The husband fell to the ground with only the woman’s emptiness in his chest, and so he died before he could harm any other woman with his cold-hearted lies.

From then on, the woman and all her daughters were Stealers, a revenge upon the world of men. If a man gave a Stealer his heart, she would rip it from his chest and take it to replace her broken one. Every while, they would have to steal another heart, because the hearts of men are not true, and they do not last.Even now, the woman walks the world among her daughters as a reminder — we hunt them for the women who cannot.


	2. The Girl Who Didn't Need A Heart

This is the story of the girl who didn’t need a heart.

First, there was the women who stole her heart back. You know her, don’t you? She lived a long time past her story, wrapped in the stories of others. This is the story of her eldest daughter. 

Her eldest daughter was a quiet child. Each night, she sat at her mother’s knee and braided her hair into silk-fine strands for sleep. They slept curled in the same bed, sharing the warmth of the fire in their veins.

Some nights, the woman didn’t come back till long after the moon had risen in the sky. Her daughter understood her. She understood the dark marks against her mother’s throat, the slash of a smile on her mother’s face, the blood that spotted her clothes. Each night her mother came home late, the eldest daughter would take her dresses to the river and wash them clean. The river would sing, and the eldest daughter would sing back, bathed in moonlight.

Slowly, the eldest daughter and the mother gained a family. Sisters filled the house, crammed in corners and sleeping in piles and driving the eldest daughter away from her mother’s bed. The younger sisters needed that fire more than the eldest daughter did.

She slept against the hearth, her ear to the ground, listening to the faint hush of the water out back of their house. And she slept easy.

As the eldest, the girl who didn’t need a heart was the wisest. She was the one who stayed up when her sisters cried through the night. She was the one who kept the fire banked, the bread on the table. And she understood. She understood everything.

She understood why her sisters drew ash-people on the hearth, separated from their charcoal hearts. Most of all, the girl understood her mother. She understood why she melted into the night, again and again, leaving her eldest daughter to care for the rest. She understood the empty pull, the yearning, how her mother wished for more, more, more.

But the eldest daughter didn’t agree with her mother. She saw the blankness in her face when she shopped in the village. She saw the way her mother cared not for anyone beyond her family — and not even her family, when the heart-heat got strong enough and she would pace the hearth, twisted in pain. The eldest daughter understood the half-patter of her own heart, yearning to be given and taken and traded away.

The eldest daughter loved all her sisters. The cruel ones, the sweet ones, the ones that had passed in the cradle. But she saw the heartlessness in their eyes in a way wholly different than she felt it in their own. Her tiniest sister, no older than four, drew ash hearts on her sweets and licked them clean. They tasted sweeter that way, her youngest sister told her.

It was too easy to understand what she meant with their mother blank-eyed and blood-lined behind them.

So when the eldest daughter reached her eighteenth birthday, she knew it was time. She braided her hair into thread-thin strands, just as she had done to her mother when she was not the eldest daughter but the only. When the moon reached full, she crept out at night, the remnants of their fire clasped to her chest. She picked her way down the rocks to the riverbank, silver in late-night light. She painted child’s ash hearts on her clothes, her skin, the rocks on the riverbank.

So adorned, she sat down, world-heavy. And she spoke to the river for the first time in plain words, not song.

My friend, she said. You who have washed clean the blood of a hundred men. You who have calmed the fevers of my sisters. You, who have sung me to sleep. Will you grant me one more favour? I beg you to wash me clean, cool my heart and fill my veins with ice and blue.

The river spoke back, sing-song and kind. My daughter, it told her, why would you wish yourself colder?

My family burns themselves up. I have been warm and I know the cost. Fire cannot wash away the blood from my hands. Fire cannot wish me to sleep. Fire cannot save my heart from itself.

Close your eyes, the river whispered. And it sang something new. Something beautiful.

Some days, if you go down to the river, you can hear her laughing in the current with her river-mother. And they say if you wash your clothes on the riverbank, they come away pressed with ash-hearts.


End file.
